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Groundswell put their mouths where the money is

Nick Miller, New York

Veterans don Guy Fawkes masks while demonstrating in front of the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington, DC. Photo: Getty Images

''SO YOU'RE in favour of a more even distribution of wealth?'' asks the long-haired, casually dressed guy with the camera.

It's unclear whether he's a protester, a member of the underground media, an amateur video blogger or, most likely, a modern ''all of the above''. Just about everyone in the Occupy Wall Street protest movement, which for almost three weeks has surprised itself and the rest of America with its virility, has mastered the art of waving a banner with one hand and recording their surroundings with an iPhone in the other.

In this case, the interviewee, a 40-something marching proudly through downtown Manhattan with his wife, winces a bit.

Noah Fischer shouts his protests against income inequality while demonstrating in the financial district of New York City. Photo: Reuters

''Uh, to a degree,'' he says. ''I, uh, think you should be allowed to accumulate a bit of money. To encourage people.''

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The marchers' protest banners are diverse: ''It's not a recession, it's a robbery'', ''Wall St should buy stocks, not politicians'' and ''corporate greed is un-American'' are interspersed with ''Bob Dylan please show'', ''I agree'', ''Love sees'' and ''Group meditation for peace''. There are even a couple of apparently un-ironic ''I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more''.

They chant ''Banks get bailed out, we get sold out'' and ''I am the 99 per cent''.

Garth Carroll, who's homeless and calls himself Professor Gizmo, wears the American flag as he demonstrates in Seattle. Photo: Reuters

The movement that began with a small number of young people pitching a tent in front of the New York Stock Exchange has caught fire in other cities: Washington, San Francisco, Houston, Austin, Philadelphia, Portland, Iowa City. In Seattle police arrested 25, but in Los Angeles the mayor distributed ponchos.

On Thursday, President Barack Obama was forced to take notice. Occupy Wall Street's most coherent demand, that America's top earners should pay more tax, chimes closely with Mr Obama's stated policy. ''I think people are frustrated and, you know, the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works,'' Mr Obama said, cautiously.

On paper (literally, the cheekily named The Occupied Wall Street Journal), OWS's Declaration of the Occupation is a grab-bag of complaints that cover corporate profits, discrimination, the environment, animal testing, privacy and corruption.

Zeb Krieger dresses as a chicken with a dramatic message in Portland. Photo: AP

But once you start chatting to these protesters, their personal woes are more unified, overwhelmingly centred on money. Students with minimal job prospects are buckling under $US50,000-plus student loans. Families are struggling to pay home loans and face repossession. The uninsured despair at massive healthcare bills.

It's clear that whatever the message precisely is, many people like it, and it is still gaining momentum.

OWS began in mid-July, when Vancouver-based anti-consumerist magazine AdBusters proposed the ''occupation'' with an eye-catching poster of a ballerina on Wall Street's Charging Bull statue. In a sign of the times, it was born with a ready-made Twitter hashtag, creating an immediate online community.

Other protest movements signed up to the idea - including the shadowy Anonymous online activists - and on day one, September 17, thousands showed up. But barely 200 stayed for that night's ''occupation'', which could have ended there. Somehow, it didn't.

Protesters Chris and Ray were there from the start. ''On day three it was pouring with rain and there were just 30 of us there,'' Chris says. ''But a few days after that it was clear it had sparked a movement, which is why we stayed. I didn't expect it to turn into this.''

Chris puts the protest's staying power down to the way it is organised: a distributed power network that puts no one, or everyone, in charge. ''I think that's really important,'' he says. ''It's not a power trip for young would-be politicians, it feels like a groundswell.''

Efforts to contain the protest have been a big factor in spurring it on. A march of a few hundred people gained widespread publicity when police tried to break it up, using pepper spray. Half a dozen people around every incident were recording it on smartphones: police ''brutality'' was displayed all over YouTube, supplying grist to the Twitter mill.

Then a march across Brooklyn Bridge broke from the footpath and police arrested 700 - many of them involved for the first time, some of them journalists - again lifting the movement's profile.

Mainstream media were cautious about giving space to OWS, though that has gradually changed, spearheaded by The Guardian, which set up a live blog from the occupation. Right-wing media were happy to take notice, because they found plenty to mock in the colourful crowd. The movement has been mocked as the ''Hippie Spring'' in the Wall Street Journal.

But journalist Nicholas Kristof, who covered the Arab Spring uprisings for The New York Times, raised eyebrows when he tweeted that the feeling in downtown New York reminded him of Tahrir Square in Cairo, the centre of the protests that toppled Egypt's president.

''True, no bullets are whizzing around, and the movement won't unseat any dictators,'' Kristof wrote later. ''But there is the same cohort of alienated young people, and the same savvy use of Twitter and other social media to recruit more participants. Most of all, there's a similar tide of youthful frustration with a political and economic system that protesters regard as broken, corrupt, unresponsive and unaccountable.''

At this Wednesday's rally, a union leader raised one of the biggest cheers of the afternoon when he urged, ''Let's not let the Tea Party be the voice of the working people in America''.

Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto is less impressed. He rates the protesters as a mix of ''(1) airheads, and (2) basically just big-government Democrats with an authoritarian streak''.

He predicts ''this will all fizzle out as the weather gets cooler'' which, by the current forecast, means next Wednesday.